Bob Hoskins, the late English actor, felt a ghost he encountered as a teen gave him good fortune.
Hoskins abandoned school at the age of 15 after his professors chained his left hand to a chair in an attempt to force him to write with his right hand.
In the late 1950s, he worked as a porter at Covent Garden. This central London location was a busy fruit and vegetable market until the late 1960s. Due to traffic congestion, this market was relocated three miles southwest of Covent Garden in 1974.
Hoskins worked at a shop where fuses frequently exploded. He’d go down to the basement and mend them.
He encountered what he describes as a lovely female ghost on two occasions.
He was terrified the first time he saw her, but he couldn’t help but notice her exquisite face and hands.
She was about two feet away from him the second time he saw her. He dashed upstairs to inform the shop’s owner of what he had witnessed. His supervisor, an older gentleman, was unsurprised.
“Oh, you’ve seen one of the nuns,” he assured the ecstatic teen. He went on to say that the location of the shop was formerly a convent.
A section of Covent Garden was walled off for Westminster Abby beginning in 1200. It was known as “the Garden of the Abby and Convent” at the time.
His manager then informed Hoskins that he was in luck since, according to a local myth, anyone who saw one of these nuns would have “a lucky life.”
Later, Hoskins rose to prominence in the United States after starring opposite animated characters in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? In 1989, he told a Spin magazine reporter that his life had been fortunate.
